Posted
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Unknown Lameron Monday April 21, 2014 @10:10PM
from the perfect-for-space-exploration dept.

Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Last week, the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau approved Palcohol, a powdered alcohol product that you can either use to turn water into a presumably not-that-delicious marg or to snort if you don't care too much about your brain cells. It's the first time a powdered alcohol product has been approved for sale in the US, but not the first time someone has devised one, and such products have been available in parts of Europe for a few years now. Now you may be wondering, as I was, how the heck do you go about powdering alcohol? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of chemistry involved, but the process doesn't seem overly difficult; we've known how to do it since the early 1970s, when researchers at the General Foods Corporation (now a subsidiary of Kraft) applied for a patent for an 'alcohol-containing powder.'"
It turns out the labels were issued in error, so don't expect it to be available soon. But it does appear to be a real thing that someone is trying to have approved.

Maybe this is how Jesus originally did it. If God's been around forever, He knows all sorts of cool stuff that we don't. The next question is whether or not alcohol could be powdered by someone with the proper knowledge, but only primitive technology.

Hey, I'm turning water into ale even as I sit here. Not that hard. A bit of barley, some hops, some yeast. I'd turn water into wine too but NC wine simply sucks, at least so far. Wrong climate, wrong soil, and who wants to turn water in the form of imported extract into wine?

The difference between this ancient process of turning water into beer, ale, wine and adding a powder to water that releases alcohol is that one might actually want to drink the results of the former process and one might even find

Try something besides grapes for your wine. You have fairly decent peaches in that area if I'm not mistaken, and peach wine can be quite pleasant if you don't over-sugar it (which I tend to do). Just keep in mind that while commercial wines stop fermenting when the PH changes or they run out of sugar, homemade wines with wild yeasts stop fermenting when they've poisoned themselves with too much alcohol.

The real question is how it does at water purification. It should take care of bacteria, no problem. How it does on organisms like giardia, though, is more relevant to a backpacker. Compare the weight/bulk of powdered alcohol to other water purification methods, and you might have a winner.

Unfortunately that has to be filed with Battle of Britain night fighter pilots having super night vision due to a high carrot diet - a cool sounding historical "factiod" that has caught on instead of being an actual fact. There was a paper about it within the last year that got a lot of press and it's probably even been used as a "weird news" filler in your local paper or morning news show.As other posters have pointed out there was also the low alcohol small beer but it turns out that water was drunk more

They had the (dubious) advantage of having already been exposed to whatever was in the local wells. You get the same thing today: go to any third-world country and you'll get sick drinking what the locals drink. After that, your immune system will be primed to whatever they've got.

The worst offenders are the wells contaminated with human waste, which brings you whatever bugs everybody else has. A good well is deep enough to avoid that contamination, and you keep your latrines downstream of it. Still... ever

Forget smoking, I'm waiting for the first reports of someone ending up in hospital because they tried to snort the stuff.

Sounds like they've already thought of that:

"To take precautions against this action, we've added volume to the powder so it would take more than a half of a cup of powder to get the equivalent of one drink up your nose. You would feel a lot of pain for very little gain."

I think snorting a half a cup of powder would take a pretty determined effort.

FWIW I think ethanol along with many other alcohols can be vaporized without combusting. Personally I have done some kitchen chemistry with isopropanol. While evaporating it in a smallish room, it built up to a noticeable odor in the room and I think the buzz I got was a little more than placebo. Kinda like drinking the stuff, or huffing correction fluid or acetone. Not that I recommend doing any of this - but airborne delivery of alcohol seems plausible. probably would irritate the fuck out of your t

I've occasionally heated up liquor to pour over a dessert before flaming it. Brought it to near-boiling in the microwave, and carrying it over to the table where we were going to serve it was... entertaining. It goes right through your sinuses into your bloodstream, faster than drinking it, but I'd much rather drink it.

This powdered alcohol does keep telling you not to snort it; says it'll get you drunk but be unpleasant, and certainly with the flavored versions I'd expect that to be true. (Even with th

It has now come to light that Palcohol received approval for their label, not the product. A representative for the federal bureau said that the approval was made in error, though details were not provided about how the error occurred. Palcohol creator Mark Phillips was not available for comment, but agreed to surrender the approvals this afternoon. Phillips will likely re-evaluate the situation and try for approval on his labels again.

This will be approved when the powder has a weight, volume, and alcohol content comparable to the liquid forms currently on the market. Which kind of defeats the purpose.

On a tangent, there is no technical reason for rubbing alcohol to be made of isopropyl alcohol (not fit for human consumption), rather than ethanol (basically the same thing as vodka.) There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.

... There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.

This should be news to no one. The high sin/public health tax on alcohol (theories of the tax vary) is a key and very prominent feature of public alcohol policy. Most people feel it should be heavily taxed - public discussion of the issue is limited almost exclusively to whether it should be higher still. Powdered alcohol will be regulated no differently.

It is so that rubbing alcohol may be sold without further precautions. That's why it's labelled 'denatured'. Anybody notice something about the price of rubbing alcohol (say, the 70%abv stuff) versus the potable variety?

Food grade equipment and starting stock is the reason.
Sure there's the "sin tax" for governments to get more money out of alcohol, but that's not the bulk of the difference. The bulk of the price difference is from the fact that you're starting with food grade materials and using food grade stills and other equipment. With non-food-grade alcohol distillation they can throw whatever they want in and, if it's a little impure, or contains some toxins it doesn't matter because no one is supposed to drink it

In the US, "rubbing alcohol" usually refers to isopropyl alcohol, not ethanol, and it's medical-use purity. And you can absorb alcohol through your skin, so you wouldn't want toxic impurities in it.

That's different from "denatured alcohol", which is usually some combination of ethanol and things that are bad for you, and it's the version that's not food-grade, it's paint-thinner-grade solvent.

The strongest distilled ethanol-water combinations are about 96% ethanol, which has a lower boiling point than pure ethanol; if you want to get it any drier than that, you need to add some kind of other organic solvent such as benzene, so that you can boil off the alcohol-water-benzene mixture at an even lower temperature, leaving the ethanol and less or no water. But you're not normally going to do that for food-grade alcohols, because you don't want any remaining benzene, and because 96% is too strong to be actually drinkable anyway; maybe you'd want a stronger alcohol if you wanted to dissolve some flavoring that's less soluble with the remaining water content, but 96% is usually strong enough to do the job pretty well.

That's different from "denatured alcohol", which is usually some combination of ethanol and things that are bad for you, and it's the version that's not food-grade, it's paint-thinner-grade solvent.

I don't even use denatured alcohol for cleaning things. You can buy pure IPA in gallon steel cans (or even five gallon cans!) at most hardware stores. The only time I've gotten it cheaper is in those rare cases when the grocery outlet has 70% IPA, but usually it's only 50% and less than 70% won't adequately clean many varnishes and so on off of the metal surfaces where I tend to use IPA — in automotive applications. I refill my bottles and then add water to make my own 75%-ish bottles for less-demandi

Yup, my dad was lamenting the fact that you can't get good solvent based paints or cement sealers anymore, my brother has a house he recently purchased with wooden shake siding that's been neglected for probably 20+ years and it could really use the extra penetration of solvent based paint.

Around a century ago in Germany there was some Schnapps just a bit beyond that point. Not so hard to distill off some more water with just a little bit of Benzene in the mix. Of course if it doesn't poison you immediately there is cancer to look forward to.I think there's some varieties of high purity lab ethanol with similar additives to make it easier to distill.

That's true if that "powder" was made in some process (usually freeze-drying) that removes water and thus decreasing the weight of whatever you're powderizing. When powderizing is done by adding substances, that's just more dead weight you have to carry.

The only other point I could imagine would be easier handling, but liquid alcohol can be used as-is and does not require additional ingredient (water) and additional time to become useable. Depending on the grain size of the powder, a gale

An EMPTY bottle would take up uneccsessary room. I don't know the specifics of the powdered alcohol, but my guess would be that it takes up MORE volume than liquid alcohol.

Imagine the volume you need in your shopping bag to carry home 1 kg of sugar. you need roughly 300ml of water to put that into solution. So at least for sugar, you're decreasing the volume by storing it as a solution. (but of course increasing the weight by 300g) I'm pretty sure that that's the case too for alcohol, espescially if you hav

You're not worried about breakage of the container when backpacking, you use an anodized aluminum bottle with a plastic/rubber screw top stopper, something like this [rei.com]. They've really never been a problem with packing for me (the stove on the other hand..)

It's both a sugar AND an alcohol. It's been available in powdered form for a long time. I do not believe it can intoxicate humans, so perhaps not considered "Alcohol" by most people, but the article didn't mention ethanol by name.

I'm going to be in Europe next week. I want to know what parts of Europe it's available in, because I'm rather curious what it was taste like and whether you could actually get successfully intoxicated off it. Where can you buy it?

Given that unpretentious vodka is pretty much food-grade ethanol and water, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, and powdered alcohol would be food grade ethanol, some sort of dextrin, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, they'd have to be saving a lot of money on the reduced bulk and weight of the omitted water to do any better.

Given that, and given the obvious utility in alcohol concealment and infiltration scenarios, I suspect that they aren't even going for price parity with either the Not Too Much Methanol(tm) brand vodkas or the Tastes Like Piss And Turns to Piss!(tm) economy beer sector.

I can get 1.75L of decent vodka for about $13/US. That gives me approximately 39 drinks at $0.33 per drink. How much does this stuff cost?

Because, you know, that's all that matters when you're trying to be wasted every day.

Decent Vodka??? please tell me which brand sells decent vodka at that price? (genuinely interested as a vodka lover) and by decent I mean you should be able to tell the difference between it and metho!

much of the vodka on the market today, especially the cheap crap, is little more than what you describe. but a good vodka DOES have taste, the taste varies from vodka to vodka based on the distillation process and filtration (if any). The crap that is passed off as vodka in most of the cheaper brands isn't even fit as a mixer.

If the vodka has any taste other than the taste of alcohol, the distiller has failed (except in cases where it is specifically flavored such as vanilla vodka). Vodka is supposed to be a flavorless spirit. For that matter, there have been numerous blind taste tests and the results indicate that while people can distinguish between vodkas when they drink it neat they cannot do so when it is in a mixed drink (the tests mostly compared mid-level vodkas to premium vodkas, so there may be some difference between

BULLSHIT. traditionally vodka has had significant taste, it is a fairly recent thing where filtration and distillation have gone to extremes to remove all taste. the top end brands pride themselves on NOT filtering and distilling out all the taste.

Well, if you consider 1949 to be fairly recent I guess you are correct. According to U.S. law vodka is a neutral spirit without distinctive character, odor, or taste (there are in addition definitions regarding the degree to which it is diluted from 95% alcohol for sale). Considering that traditionally the word vodka is just an eastern european word with the same derivation as whiskey (both are derived from the word for water) ANY distilled spirit could be called "vodka", including brandy.
Basically, it co

The rest of the world can do whatever it wants, but when you are discussing a topic on a U.S. based website, with a majority of contributors living in the U.S., you can expect that people who are discussing a topic will be using the definition of a word as it is used in the U.S.. If you would prefer to use the word vodka to mean "any distilled beverage", that is certainly your privilege. However, do not expect to actually communicate much with that term. If you do, I will tell you that currently the best vo

A good vodka has no taste, it's run through charcoal to eliminate any character, aroma, color or taste. There is a reason the best vodkas are only $40 a fifth, triple distilled with filtering is all that is needed, the goal is to have only alcohol and water. Contrast that with whiskey which is much more complex, flavors from the mash and charred barrels must work in symphony with each other and makers take extra precautions when making whiskey because you cannot filter out any mistakes since you will lose f

That's is what all vodkas are, they are triple or quadrupled distilled and filtered then water is added at the end to get it to the correct proof. Poland, the birthplace of vodka, grades vodka based on purity. Any vodkas with flavor are infused by putting the flavor agent in after the distillation and filtering are complete.

That's is what all vodkas are, they are triple or quadrupled distilled and filtered then water is added at the end to get it to the correct proof. Poland, the birthplace of vodka, grades vodka based on purity. Any vodkas with flavor are infused by putting the flavor agent in after the distillation and filtering are complete.

They are graded on purity, however if you have filtered out all the flavour from the crop it was produced from the vodka maker has failed. Even polish vodka makers pride themselves on NOT filtering out all the tastes and aromas of the crop.

I've done work for a distiller. My contact there is a good guy and knows a ton about the products and how their made. I had seen some kind of advertising for vodka in that price range and was giving him a hard time, asking why I should buy his premium product when the cheap stuff was being advertised as four-column distilled.

What he told me was that cheap vodka is made from a large percentage of what he called "blend" which is primarily a distilled alcohol product made from waste oranges. As a giveaway to the orange industry, waste oranges can be made into alcohol with a much lower excise tax than grain alcohol. He said you wouldn't make the excise tax on grain alcohol at $13 for nearly two liters, let alone any profit.

I've always gotten rotten hangovers from cheap vodka and he says that "blend" is the reason why, it lacks the purity of grain alcohol.

too busy enjoying good health care, education, not getting shot,not being murdered, not being hated by the majority of the world, not having mass shooting in school.. If only they had cheap Alcohol then they too could be like the pride of the world MERICA!

however, several researchers have been researching for alcohol substitute that could be cleared from body with another substance.

however biggest problem with this research is simply that any such substance is either already labeled as a drug or gets labeled as a drug very fast. because alcohol is the only thing state wants you to use for druggy effects.

Synthehol was one of those dumbass things that can only exist in Star Trek fantasy land (like a communist society where everyone just works for the common good, there is no money, and no crewmember ever complains that the captain is the only one getting laid). Who the fuck likes the "taste" of ethanol?? We drink it specifically for its EFFECTS. Take those away and you had may as well just drink a regular fruit drink.

Synthehol was one of those dumbass things that can only exist in Star Trek fantasy land

Why would you say that? Humans have been testing random drugs in a rather scattershot manner for the last several tens of thousands of years. It's only recently that any sort of methodology has begun to be applied to studying chemical effects on the brain. I actually would be very surprised if something were not found in the next few years that gave a similar high to alcohol but without the nasty hangover.

I actually would be very surprised if something were not found in the next few years that gave a similar high to alcohol but without the nasty hangover.

I agree such a chemical would be sweet. But from the general description usually given in the series, that's not what synthehol was. It basically removed the high altogether (or at least made it impossible to actually get intoxicated).